63 Exhibition Highlights

Dwelling

Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde

Through September 4

Home often looks like a state of mind, and it’s not always a reassuring picture. As seen in Dwelling, the current show at Canal Projects’ Chinatown gallery, the kinship of objects, however appealing or artfully arranged, isn’t enough to relieve the tediousness of introspection—or mortality, for that matter. Take Picasso’s Table, a canvas by the Brooklyn painter Marcus Jahmal that reinterprets the Cubist repast into a deathly composition of drinking glasses, an eating vessel, spilled wine, and a calf’s skull. Illustrator

Kyung Me, who also hails from Brooklyn, transmutes the dread of domestic routines into moody noirscapes halfway between Double Indemnity and The Handmaiden, while Los Angeles–based painter Kenrick McFarlane colorfully invokes the estrangement of the self that is the lot of homo economicus. The works, which all hew closely to the humors of contemporary figuration, gain from their tasteful surrounds, courtesy of Brooklyn design studio Worrell Yeung. SM

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish

What if Van Gogh’s churning skies weren’t the projective howls of a soul in torment but rather toxic belches? Factories at Clichy, painted in 1887, implants the idea that Van Gogh reckoned with the transformational effects of industry. On this canvas, smokestacks bloom with the proliferation of sunflowers. It is one of two dozen by Van Gogh showcased here, which, despite the marquee, encompasses the work of four of his contemporaries:

Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Émile Bernard, and Charles Angrand. This “avant-garde” is retroactively constituted, though there are a few commonalities that justify the framing. In the 1880s, the unknowing postimpressionists frequented Asnières, a northwest suburb of Paris whose clamorous manufactories seemed to have elicited a new sensibility. Lurking off to the side of Signac’s placid “Ponton de la Félicité” at Asnières (Opus no. 143) is an unassuming gas holder. Van Gogh ventured a reproduction, a failure that nonetheless sent him on his way. SM

Carl Craig: Party/After-Party

Through July 23

Is Pipilotti Rist the godmother of today’s profligate displays of “immersive” art like the Museum of Ice Cream and Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience? Unlike that frothy bilge, Rist’s installations aren’t invitations to pose, gambol, or lose oneself to childish urges. That they doubtlessly incite some of these same responses shouldn’t be taken as capitulation; there is plenty in Rist to unsettle, disturb, or just understand. First staged at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) in 2017, Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish wholeheartedly take up pointillism’s cosmic pretentions, a position that sees in the infinitesimal an image of the universe. Selfie-takers fear not: There are blinking orbs galore. Characteristically for Rist, Worry partly flirts with the architecture itself, a rare fan-shaped design by Mies van der Rohe. Both pieces, plus a third (Peeping Freedom Shutters for Olga Shapir [2020]), were recently acquired by the MFAH. Given their popularity, it’s a sound investment. SM

Flashing light and sound constitute Party/ After-Party , an installation by the DJ Carl Craig at the Warehouse in Los Angeles. With its industrial connotations, the venue is utterly fitting for Craig, a habitué of the techno scene that sprang up in 1980s Detroit. The dark and steely mise-en-scène, complete with clangorous soundtrack, is meant to evoke late-night warehouse parties, albeit during opening hours; the untz-untz beats dribble out into the surrounding museum, much to visitors’ bemusement. (Craig previously staged the piece in the basement of New York’s Dia Beacon.) The most game among them can strut their stuff on the dance floor at the center of the lugubrious space, though the revelry isn’t meant to last. The overhead lamps flip on as the music drops out, revealing a spare room of plenty of incongruous outfits. You know what they say about parties: You gotta know when to leave. SM